Customer service representatives are often responsible for servicing a wide range of incoming calls. To service a call effectively and in an efficient manner, it is important that a customer service representative be supplied with customer specific information in a convenient, easy to access manner, e.g., on a display screen of an operator workstation.
Responding to a customer's inquiry regarding the purchase of services or products, service outages, billing issues, etc., and being able to address those issues by updating information and/or initiating work orders can be important in satisfying a customer. However, customer service calls provide the customer service representatives, and thus the service provider they represent, an opportunity to offer additional services, features or upgrades, sometimes referred to as “upselling” which can result in additional revenue being generated for the service provider. To maximize such upselling opportunities, it would be desirable if customer offers could be targeted to individual customers based on their specific account information, as opposed to the customer being presented with a standard offer presented perhaps based on the call type but not on the specific customer account details.
Customer service calls offer a particularly valuable opportunity to collect data and identify system problems. Unfortunately, customer service representatives are usually located in various locations, e.g., at individual divisions, and the information to which they are exposed in terms of customer complaints, reports of faults, billing errors, etc. often get addressed on an individual basis without the information being used to support detection and correction of fundamental problems or to trigger preemptive action which could avoid a problem encountered in one region from occurring or becoming significant in another region.
In view of the above discussion, it should be appreciated that there is a need for new and improved ways of selecting offers to be presented to customers during customer service calls. There is also a need for collecting call information, e.g., information on the reasons for calls, information on the number of calls e.g., for a given reason, and disposition results. It would be particularly useful is such information could be collected and processed into reports, e.g., for different divisions of a company where each division may correspond to a different geographic region. With regard to division reports it would be useful if information in reports corresponding to one time interval can be examined and compared with information corresponding to other time intervals to identify problems and/or trends which may be evident from a review of the collected call information. It would also be desirable if call related information corresponding to one division could be compared to call related information corresponding to one or more other divisions in an attempt to identify problems at one division which may be evident from a review of information across divisions but may not seem unusual at a given division.
While being able to review and analyze call information to identify problems and generate alerts is desirable, it is preferable that such analysis and alerts can be generated in near real time, e.g., within one or a few hours of call information for a period of time being collected.
In view of the above discussion, it should be appreciated that there is a need for improvement in the way customer service calls are handled and how information generated from the handling of those calls is used to improve system reliability, efficiency and/or provide other benefits.